The recent rediscovery of the emigrant Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky raises the question of the construction of the literary canon, from which women and foreigners were more often than not excluded. It is no surprise, then, that Susan Suleiman—whose book on the roman à thèse (or the ideological novel) renewed the complex issue of the relations between literature and ideology and became an indispensable reference in the field—decided to dedicate her forthcoming book to Némirovsky and these very questions. Suleiman, moreover, is also a feminist critic attentive to the marginal place and role assigned to women in history: already in her book on the avant-garde, she had explored the ways in which the surrealists considered their female fellow travelers as icons, rather than as writers or artists. Also relevant are her reflections on the effects of exile on creativity and, more recently, on the question of memory—including both official ‘History’ as well as the ways more private mechanisms of traumatic memory are translated into literary expression (as in the case of Georges Perec). Following Suleiman's path—albeit from a sociological standpoint, and as a complement to the question of the construction of the canon, this essay will explore the mechanisms of exclusion proper to the literary field, and more specifically the role of literary institutions in the protection or exclusion of writers marginalized during the Second World War because of their Jewish origins or political opinions.

This reflection aims at contributing more broadly to the study of mechanisms of exclusion in the intellectual field in times of crisis, and of the function of institutions in these processes. The accentuation of political constraints reveals the cohesive and disruptive forces within the intellectual field and the tension between solidarity and segregation, which operates in all societies and milieus in a more subtle way in ordinary periods. While the memory of the Vichy period is still an issue at stake in French society, it has become more broadly a paradigm of the resistance-collaboration scheme, but can also tell us about how identities are constructed and assigned by the state and by institutions in different social fields.